"Collapse or Destruction? The Construction of the Yugoslav Wars"
Chip Gagnon

Paper presented at National Convention of AAASS, Boston, Mass., November 15, 1996

Draft: Please do not cite without author's permission

Introduction

Why did Yugoslavia collapse? Although this seems like a straightforward question, one that has indeed been the focus of much debate, it contains an assumption about the answer. The term collapse implies a natural process, the final step of something that was bound to happen; collapse usually refers to a structure that was already so weak that its demise was essentially inevitable. Collapse also avoids any reference to agency. If something collapses no one in particular is to blame. Because the Yugoslav "collapse" was marked by sustained violence along ethnic lines, the image of collapse is often accompanied by references to the "explosion" of ethnic hatreds. Again, the implication is that the violence just happened, it was part of a natural process, an expression of already existing "facts on the ground." But an examination of the actual course of events provides a quite different picture.

Rather than a spontaneous or naturally occurring event, the wars and violence along ethnic lines in Yugoslavia were purposeful, rational political strategies by particular actors meant to achieve specific goals, including the destruction not only of the Yugoslav state and ideology but also of the social and community realities on the ground within these Yugoslav republics. Particular actors in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina worked very hard to accomplish these goals. These actors planned and staged violence in strategically important (in a political sense) geographic locations: ethnically heterogeneous regions of Croatia and Bosnia- Hercegovina. The violence was perpetrated along ethnic cleavages, and was described and justified by the perpetrators themselves in terms of ethnicity solidarity.

In light of these facts, a more appropriate question would be: Did Yugoslavia collapse? From the perspective of facts on the ground, the answer is no, it was destroyed. Since destruction is much more clearly an intentional act, this question forces us to focus on the decisions and behavior of particular actors rather than assuming the events to be the outcome of impersonal and objective processes outside of anyone's control.

The question of collapse/explosion vs. destruction would seem to be merely a minor terminological question. But it points to the importance of the terms we use and the concepts underlying our analyses. In this case, it suggests that less problematic questions to start with, and ones that provide a clearer sense of where to look for answers, would be: How can we understand and explain the sustained violence in the former Yugoslavia? What was the relationship between that violence and the breakup of the Yugoslav state into its constituent republics? And what was the relationship between ethnicity, the violence and the breakup? This terminological question thus points to a more fundamental conceptual challenge for scholars seeking to explain and understand cases of sustained violent conflict along ethnic lines. I'd like to suggest that one of the main problems is exactly a conceptual one, in particular the problem of integrating notions of culture such as ethnicity into our understanding of politics and war without reifying it into naturally occurring, homogeneous and clearly bounded groups.

In this paper I first address the conceptual challenge of ethnicity and politics, showing how expressions such as collapse and disintegration reflect the assumptions of realist and liberal approaches about the nature of violent "ethnic conflicts" and of ethnicity itself. I then suggest a way to understand the importance of culture without reifying and naturalizing its meaning into an attribute or interest of a group. In particular I focus on culture (including ethnicity) as a shared system of communications or frame of reference. Using this concept of ethnicity I then explore how the conflicts in Yugoslavia were constructed, and to what end. I argue that ethnically-centered political discourse focusing on threats, as well as violence along ethnic lines, was neither the fulfillment of the preferences of the wider population, nor a means of mobilizing people by appealing to ethnic solidarity. Rather, these were strategies which sought to restructure political space: they sought to marginalize or silence large parts of the population in order to prevent their political participation; to reconfigure the perceived boundaries of the political community into hard borders based on a particular notion of culture; and to alter the existing demographic facts on the ground in order to turn these new notions of group borders into a territorial reality. The goal of this restructuring was to prevent or delay fundamental shifts in the structure of power within the domestic arena, shifts which reflected trends and pressures from within society as well as from the international environment. The image of threat and the construction of "ethnic" violence were thus ways to hinder or prevent the wider, politically relevant population from mobilizing against and imposing fundamental changes on the existing structure of domestic power.

I am not arguing that the sites of violent conflict along ethnic lines, including Yugoslavia, were not facing real challenges. Nor am I disputing that for many people ethnicity is an important part of their identity and culture. In the Yugoslav case, the federal state and the existing socio-economic system clearly would not emerge intact from the political, social and economic crises facing the country in the 1980s, and the "national question" would be a major part of any resolution of these crises. What is also clear however is that the violence itself was not a necessary part of the transformation or even dissolution of the Yugoslav federation, or of the resolution of the national question. There was no great groundswell of demand from the grassroots for the kind of violent policies that were implemented. And although the Yugoslav crisis was related to factors of economic and political globalization, these in no way preordained the kind of violent policies that were planned and implemented. Political and military leaders did have other options, but they purposely chose war, genocide, expulsion and violence. These choices were not forced on them by external or internal structural factors. So the key question to understanding the Yugoslav case is: Why did these actors make these particular choices? At a more general theoretical level the key question is: Why do we speak about the collapse rather than the destruction of Yugoslavia?

Forward to part 2, Ethnicity and Politics

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